These are tough times for Ronald Reagan's heirs, or at least some of them. After a generation of disastrous supply-side tax cuts helped produce mountains of debt, plummeting upper-income tax rates a decades-low federal tax burden and record income inequality, thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters nationwide are finally drawing attention to the plight of […]
Category: Taxes
In their never-ending attempts to prevent upper-income tax increases at all costs, Republicans have bemoaned the mythical impacts on small business owners and supposed "job creators." But in pointing out that the Democrats' proposed millionaires' tax to fund the American Jobs Act would disproportionately hit the gilded-class in Blue State America, the right-wing's latest gambit […]
As the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators House Minority Leader Eric Cantor called "mobs" took their protests to cities around the country, Republican frontrunners Mitt Romney and Herman Cain denounced the rallies as "class warfare." Meanwhile in Washington, President Obama signaled his support for a 5.6% tax surcharge on annual incomes over a million dollars in […]
Addressing the Congressional Joint Economic Committee Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned policymakers to "avoid fiscal actions that could impede the ongoing economic recovery." Given the grim predictions for job losses and slower economic growth forecast to result from the August debt ceiling deal and the Ryan GOP budget plan, Bernanke was certainly right […]
For months, Republican born-again deficit hawks have been warning Americans that "we're becoming Greece." Of course, as FactCheck.org and Paul Krugman among others rightly concluded, "Greece -- with a long history of fiscal irresponsibility, very high public debt, and a country without a currency -- doesn't bear much resemblance even to the other peripheral Europeans, […]
The Republican response to the President's proposal was fast, furious - and predictable. The modest increases in tax rates for upper-income Americans, the GOP's best and brightest announced, was "class warfare" and a "job-killing tax hike" which "will not give you deficit reduction." As it turns out, the year was 1993, not 2011. At issue […]
Unveiling his $3 trillion debt reduction package Monday, President Obama declared, "This is not class warfare. It's math." But for Republican born-again deficit hawks committed to perpetuating the lowest tax burden in 60 years and the highest income inequality in 80, the accusation is that Obama is threatening to restart a class war their side […]
On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner peppered his address to the Economic Club of Washington with a dozen mentions of America's so-called "job creators." But in claiming that high taxes and unnecessary regulations have "pummeled" his supposed job producers, Boehner willingly misrepresented the source of and solutions to the nation's economic problems. After all, recent […]
With U.S. income inequality at its highest level in 80 years and the total federal tax burden at its lowest in 60, the last thing America needs to do is further reduce the capital gains tax. As a decade of data shows, the Treasury-draining Bush capital gains and dividend tax windfall for the wealthy not […]
When is a tax cut not a tax cut? According to Republicans, when those receiving it are working Americans and the President proposing it is a Democrat. Because after they spent 2010 ensuring the extension of the Bush tax cut windfall for the wealthy by insisting "you should never have to offset the cost of […]